1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to authentication-based printing technology that allows execution of printing upon authentication.
2. Related Art
Authentication-based printing structures, where, to prevent information leaks and other risks, execution of printing is only allowed for an authenticated user, have been well known. For example, Japanese Patent No. 3034160 discloses a structure where a confidential document is not printed out immediately upon a printing instruction for that document, but is printed out upon a user having been authenticated as an authorized user, using image data, which has been made based on the data to be printed and stored in the printing device.
In this type of authentication-based printing structure, an authenticated printing person will be permitted to execute printing only for the print-jobs for which the user has been authorized. In conventional structures, whether a user has been authorized for a specific print-job is usually determined by analyzing that print-job to extract the user information, and then using the extracted user information.
However, in the current situation, different printer manufacturers use largely different print-job formats, and one reason for that is that printer control languages used for generating print-jobs have been developed independently by those different printer manufacturers and other developers.
Thus, for a printing device accepting print-jobs generated using a publicly disclosed format (or a format defined by the same developer that developed the printing device), it is possible to realize the above-mentioned authentication-based printing structure because those print-jobs can be analyzed and the necessary user information can be extracted; whereas it has not been possible to realize that authentication-based printing structure for a printing device accepting print-jobs generated using a private format, because the necessary user information cannot be extracted from those print-jobs.
Furthermore, some print-jobs include no user information, and for a printing device accepting such print-jobs, the authentication-based printing structure obviously cannot be realized even if the formats for the jobs are publicly disclosed.